In a typical application server or web server environment, a server may be receiving thousands of requests within a very short time-frame. In certain instances the server would become overloaded and be unable to process further requests. To the user this appears as a page error, or a frozen page. The user will typically keep hitting the server with requests, when this really doesn't have any effect and only serves to worsen the problem. What is needed is a mechanism that can notify the user that the server is currently overloaded, and which will allow the server to regain stability while not having to deal with further requests. The traditional approach has been to generate a server “object not found”, or to place the requests in a fixed-length queue. However, no attempt is made to characterize the requests or to, for example, reject those requests that will take longer than one minute, while servicing the others.